Hey, you know those kids who run around the store, wreaking havoc? Wouldn't you just like to smack them sometimes? Well, most of us think about it -- but a Dollar Store clerk in Georgiaactually did it. And now, as you can imagine, she's in trouble. The clerk reportedly got fed up with the 8-year-old boy, who was tearing up her store, so she called him a "demon." The boy admits he then said, "You want to see bad? I'll show you bad," and threw a cookie at her. But this was the wrong store clerk to throw a cookie at.

In an interview, the boy, Logan Ivey, said, "It was really, really painful. Nobody should have that kind of torture. It hurt." He also calls it "heartbreaking," and seems mostly concerned that this happened two days before his birthday.

The store clerk was arrested. Now, I'm certainly not saying anyone has the right to hit another person's child. But we do talk a lot about how it "takes a village" to raise a child -- and one villager took it too far. Hitting a kid with a belt 25 times -- if indeed that's what happened -- is flat-out wrong, and not at all the right of the clerk or of anyone else. Not even the parent if you ask me. Twenty-five times is excessive. (I wonder if the boy had marks? He doesn't mention that in the interview.)

I also find it odd that both parents were reportedly in the store with the boy at the time of the incident -- yet say they didn't witness it. Which means the kid was left to run around with anyone looking after him for quite awhile.

But a lot of people are leaving the disciplining of their kids up to strangers. Because they don't do it themselves. If you're not going to teach your kid how to behave in public, and then you're going to send them out into public, you can't be entirely surprised when the public doesn't respond favorably.

Yesterday, on a day when I was trying to get some work done, a parent sent four kids out into the alleyway beneath my window to play. Mind you, it's not a yard. There, they screamed at the top of their lungs for a good hour before I opened my window and asked them to keep it down. They looked at me like I had two heads. Probably went home and complained about the "meanie" neighbor.